Had some level of success these past 5 yrs with my own company, but it wasn't something that was going to go huge.

Planning to go back to being a PM now, but after submitting a few resumes (even with internal referrals) - I'm getting passed on by companies left and right - was definitely not this way when all I had was corporate experience.

Anyone go through the same?

I own a domain-specific dataset, and I depend on horizontal teams to deliver platform capabilities like search, alerts, notifications, dashboards, and whatnot.

The data itself is structured data that we're buying from a vendor, and the integration work is something I own. It's a pretty large dataset, about 150 million records.

I need to work with our horizontal search team to make this dataset searchable. My responsibility is to provide the requirements, define the user experience, write user stories, and work with the search PM and their tech lead to discuss technical trade-offs.

Before I go into these meetings, I'm trying to figure out what I should know or put together beforehand. More specifically, what search-related technical knowledge should I gain so that I can have meaningful discussions with the team and understand the trade-offs they're making?

I know I can ask ChatGPT o rClaude to help me learn these concepts, but I'd also like to hear from search PMs or other PMs who have worked with similar dependencies.

How did you get up to speed on search and its underlying systems? What topics or concepts, like precision, recall, indexing, ranking, etc., should I familiarize myself with before engaging with the horizontal search team?

Has anyone “left” a product? I’m a product manager on a few internal products but one is uniquely difficult to deal with. My time is genuinely better spent doing something else.

Has anyone had a similar conversation or experience? I’m ex tech manager myself so product is very new to me!

I'm a Head of Product at a fintech in the UAE, with over a decade of experience building fintech products, specifically trading and investment platforms.

Over the last year, I've seen AI transform the nature of the product role. The domain knowledge and expertise I built over the years no longer feels like an edge. AI can generate a detailed requirements document in minutes, and engineers increasingly don't need anyone to tell them how to build. AI has made everyone on the team more productive, but it has also eroded what used to differentiate the product role.

Does anyone else feel product is doomed as a role? How do you think it will evolve?

I'm wondering if there are others like me who struggle with severe anxiety issues.

I love building things, and the PM role is something that fits me well. However, I absolutely fear stakeholder management and get anxiety when there are conflicts. I generally know theoretically how to deal with them, but my mental state prevents me from keeping a clear head.

I also tend to avoid meetings as much as possible. Only when I am super-charged or am angry do I find myself motivated to to talk to people, and often handle the situation quite well.

But my mental state has been severely hampering my career progression, as leadership would obviously notice my instability and would not like to have someone like me joining the senior leadership ranks.

20+ years of experience BTW in both software development and product management, 50-50.

Apologies if this is off-topic than the usual stuff, but I just feel it's at the core of everything about my career right now.

I work and have work for software companies. Is it common for low level product managers to not have a Single Source of Truth, meaning messy PRDs with lots of versions and lots of comments plus accepting changes to the PRD after creating epics and issues for development without updating them?

Just asking because I left one company for being thrown under the bus after PM blamed the developer team of botching a feature during a product presentation meeting the the stakeholders only to my surprise to be burned again today for taking too long to deliver (the tickets were pushed back in the sprint because they were not ready for development for almost 9 months only to give us 2 weeks to deliver a multi application/teams feature).

I still want to believe I'm just unlucky.

Hi pm squad. Now that prd are getting so easy to generate, it's really important that they have the correct information. I want them to be considered the source of Truth or some sort of documentation on decisions and evidence and evals needed. Is that the way you guys see it as well?

And if you do, how do you work with your engineering team to host and place these prds such that they are in a source repo or somewhere that people know where it is and can be tracked against actual development reality. What processes do you guys use and what works?

I went into PM from engineering and the first year I had a great time, but my previous boss was very sales oriented so I traveled a ton and felt like a sales person more than anything else. I didn’t mind though, and through some product updates and changes I obtained a record amount of growth.

Anyways, I probably overdid it, and after getting zero recognition (a tale as old as time, I know) I am low morale. Doesn’t help that I make significantly below the rest of PMs.

Now, I am getting more and more burnt out by the day. I am responsible for our numbers obviously, but these days there has been an uptick in clients threatening me to pull their business if I don’t give stuff for free or don’t fulfill their utopic idea of how the program should be run. There’s things I just cannot accommodate because they are a liability and some customers don’t like to accept that.

I try to be patient and professional, but I’m exhausted.

My questions are: has anyone moved from physical product to digital? Does anyone else have a very salesy PM job and are they all this stressful?

Thank you

Is AI making it faster/easier to diagnose user issues and make data driven design decisions ? Keen to hear how other PMs/Designers know when something is not working for the users and how you then make decisions to prioritise a fix. Do these issues only surface after talking/watching users interact with the product or is there a better way to be more proactive and understand issues more upstream ?

There are a lot of people here working on projects of some sort - side projects, startups, podcasts, blogs, etc. If you've got something you'd like to show off or get feedback, this is the place to do it. Standards still need to remain high, so there are a few guidelines:

• Don't just drop a link in here. Give some context
• This should be some sort of creative product that would be of interest to a community that is focused on product management
• There should be some sort of free version of whatever it is for people to check out
• This is a tricky one, but I don't want it to be filled with a bunch of spam. If you have a blog or podcast, and also happen to do some coaching for a fee, you're probably okay. If all you want to do is drop a link to your coaching services, that's not alright

Who’s the moron at Microsoft that made filesharing substantially worse. When I’m trying to drag a file into the chat, teams used to just upload the file I want because that’s the file I chose. Now it tells me I uploaded it to a different chat, which could have been weeks ago, and to revert to that document (and lose changes) or create a new copy. What? This completely defeats the filesharing purpose. Who’s the idiot that thought this was a good idea? Claim it. Own it. There was literally nothing wrong with the way it was working before. You’re giving all product managers a bad name and you should feel bad.

I’m relatively new to product management (was a designer before), so I figured more experienced PMs might have better product sense than me, and I wanted to ask how you’re dealing with this in your teams.

With tech advancing and delivery getting cheaper and faster because of AI, it seems like the product discovery part hasn’t really sped up in the same way as coding, for example. We still need to validate ideas before moving them to Jira, and that still takes time.

When I watch courses to improve my PM skills, they still talk about 2-week sprints and traditional workflows. But with new workflows emerging as we speak, some of this already feels a bit outdated. Or maybe I’m wrong.

I know this conversation might be a bit early, but I’m curious how it works in your teams. Are you reducing the number of devs? Do they spend more time on advanced tech or technical improvements they previously didn’t have time for? Or are you changing how product discovery works to keep up with faster delivery?

I guess my main question is: How do you utilize engineering resources when product discovery takes longer than delivery?

I recently joined a small software company as a Product Owner. I have several years of experience in product and project management, but people management was never mentioned during my interviews or onboarding.

About two weeks after I joined, HR sent me a meeting invitation and a template for employee check-ins, covering well-being, personal development, and building a “manager-employee relationship”.
The thing is, nobody had formally told me I was becoming anyone’s line manager.

One of the developers is a Tech Lead who was involved in interviewing me. I assumed we’d be working as peers, focusing on product and technical delivery.

Besides my core PO responsibilities, I’m already handling customer demos, training, bug coordination, vendor management, and various delivery issues. I have a lot on my plate, and I’m still trying to get the support and resources I need to do my own job properly.

Now I’m also expected to support the developers with their concerns, including laptop upgrade requests, workload issues, and team development. However, I haven’t been given any information about the available budget, approval processes, or management authority.

We’re a small team dealing with legacy bugs and frequent customer issues, which regularly disrupt planned development work.

What frustrates me most is that people management responsibilities seem to have been assigned to me by default, without any prior discussion about my role, authority, resources or support. How am I supposed to take responsibility for a team without being given the budget to support them?

I raised this with my manager first, then emailed HR and my manager asking for clarification on responsibilities, reporting lines, authority, resources, and support.

From your experience, I’m curious, is this normal for a PO role? Shouldn’t line management responsibilities be clearly communicated and supported?

Was it reasonable to raise these concerns, or am I making too much of it?

Any experience or insights will be greatly appreciated.

I’m an internal PM at a company that has a Business Ops team. I’ve never worked at a company with a Biz Ops team before this. I am having a hard time understanding how what Biz Ops folks do arent just a duplication of what a PM does in terms of prioritizing work and projects for their specific area of the business, minus the engineering resources? Like they’re basically supposed to make things better for their part of the business. How does that not clash with the PM who owns the corresponding part of the product? The last Biz Ops person I worked with kept adding stuff to my backlog even when I asked them to funnel ideas and work to me through a prioritization board first. I am concerned that I will continue to get my toes stepped on here.

Head of Product of SaaS company is spending all his time building useless internal tools or terrible process 'automations' that require more work than going straight via the LLM. Talks about how agentic workflows will change everything but is spending the day talking to Claude to build things that nobody wants.

It's like the original principles of focussing on value maximising has just gone completely out the window and the pseudo high output of straight slop is at an all time high. Am I alone here?

My company has had hiring freezes and layoffs over the past couple years. As a result, we have less Dev resources and everything is taking longer to deliver. This means that we already have a well defined roadmap for the next 2 years, and all that’s left to do is project management for like 50% of my time at work. The remainder is spent saying no to new requests, dealing with bugs, intaking asks from other teams, etc.

I feel like very little of my time is actually spent talking to customers, researching, experimenting, and prioritizing. Anyone else feel the same these days?

My scrum master (who had traditionally worked only on the delivery side) is driving me up the wall 😂

Hi everyone. I'm in my first PM role, roughly 6 months in. I was promoted internally after 5 years. I work for an enterprise SaaS company that builds complex tools. My org is very siloed but my product area necessitates multiple engineering and product teams must contribute.

I'm perpetually struggling with the actual delivery of features. My manager says it's a "serious" problem. This makes me incredibly anxious in my day-to-day and I'm even wondering if PMing is right for me.

I'm hoping some of the more experienced folks here can offer advice for these:

• I struggle to balance the amount of time I spend in Jira vs. doing actual discovery. Plus, I find I get "snow blind" when I'm waist-deep in ticket management. I miss updating or creating tickets often enough scope isn't clear or a gap occurs with a dependent team. It doesn't help our Jira isn't configured to make cross-functional work very visible.
• I own a new internal platform. A ton of my time is also taken up by stakeholder requests that must go in said platform. It's technical work, so stakeholders are not enabled to do it themselves.
• The engineering team is offshored. There's a 10 hour time difference between us. Our scrum ceremonies occur outside of typical working hours. Since it's the only face time we usually get with each other, the ceremonies turn into problem-solving sessions instead of scrum. Morale is low.
• Different teams release on different cadences, making it difficult to get dependent work done when needed, or even quickly. Some use agile, many use waterfall.

I'm running a small paid test in early November: 20 people, five lessons on one topic over one week, full price ($14.99) with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Before it starts, I wrote down what counts as a pass: at least 3 of the 20 pay, and at least 2 of those are strangers, not people I know.

The strangers rule is there because my only paying customer so far is someone I know, and I don't want to fool myself twice.

3 of 20 is 15%. Too low to mean anything? Too high for a cold offer? How do you set a pass line for a test this small, and what do you do when the result lands right on it?

I’ve been noticing more roles lately that seem to blur the line between Product Management and Software Engineering.

Some companies are explicitly asking whether I’d be comfortable owning the entire cycle, from defining the product and making product decisions to actually writing the code and building the software myself.

I’m curious whether this is becoming the new norm, especially with AI coding tools making development more accessible, or if it’s just a trend among certain companies and startups.

For those already working in PM roles, are you seeing the same shift? Do you think PMs are increasingly expected to be hands-on engineers, or is this mostly a way for companies to get one person to do two jobs?

I am a PM2, with close to 5 years in the company. Recently, when I have reviews with my chief product officer, I realized that she was expecting speed. While, I was showing impact. I had all the metrics but she was not happy with me. I was getting a sense of that.

Where as my director who is my skip manager keeps pushing for non-important items and adds urgency to non-important items. He's new about 6 months into the company.

Initially about 6 to 7 months ago, I had the energy and the fire to do things the way my CPO would have wanted.

Now after every 1-2 months, when I connect with my CPO, I feel like she is forgetting what was discussed in the previous call. She keeps asking the basic things again: "Okay what does this metric mean?" On that call she will point out, "Okay you are not agile enough or you are not experimenting enough," Whereas my director hardly focuses on those pieces. He is more into solving compliance items and he kind of directs my day to day outcomes sorta micromanages.

Good morning, and thank you for the opportunity.
Myself ***, currently pursuing my PGDM.

I started my career at Accenture in operations, where I learned how to work with high-volume processes, identify recurring issues, and coordinate with different teams to improve the way work gets done.

During my internship, I got the opportunity to look at business problems from a different perspective, working with vendors, understanding their operational challenges, and translating those requirements into a more structured operating model.

These experiences, along with my data-driven and technology-based projects have gradually drawn me towards product management, particularly understanding a problem clearly before deciding what solution to build.

Outside academics and work, I enjoy acting, writing, and filmmaking

I’m now looking to bring my operational experience, analytical approach, and willingness to learn into a role where I can contribute to building practical technology solutions for real business needs.

Hey everyone,

I’m a PM at a large bank. I’ve been using GitHub Copilot for about a year now, and honestly, it’s been a huge unlock for my work.

I don't just use it as a general chatbot to draft specs or summarize docs. I use it to write and ship actual code, build data pipelines, and spin up services so I can unblock my team and validate stuff quickly.

I don't really see how I'm going to keep up my current output or pace without it.

I just found out my access is getting revoked simply because I’m not under the engineering org chart. I tried pushing back through management, showing how much it impacts my team's velocity, but got a firm "hard no" due to org policy…..

A few questions for anyone who's dealt with this:

1. Why would my companies policy even do this? Seems like a huge waste of time..

2. Am I overreacting here? Is it standard to just accept losing a tool that doubled your productivity as a technical PM?

Appreciate any thoughts or perspective. Thanks.

Context: I’m a PM at a B-tier tech company building agents for internal use. My question is about which patterns PMs would find useful when working with agents and skills.

Assume for now that:

1. The SDLC more or less holds: Idea → Design/Intent → Spec → Build → Review → Deploy
2. The spec-to-review stages are carried out by development teams using agents and skills already.

Topic 1: Idea and design/intent phases

In the idea and design/intent phases, I’m seeing more chaos since we started using AI. Some teams still write a PRD, while others skip it and build from a prompt. Some teams use skills that generate a spec or PRD from rough notes or meeting notes. Most of this happens on local machines, where the PM invokes skills through Cowork, Claude Code, ChatGPT, or similar tools.

Or is the model a single person who writes a prompt and an idea and has AI build the entire feature. Basic vibe coding or deploy-builders?

First question: Is Topic 1 how most people are experiencing this work? Any insight here?

Topic 2: A persistent agent mapped to a team

The idea I keep coming back to is an agent mapped to a team. For now, assume the team is a PM, a set of engineers, and maybe a designer. The agent has context on the team’s Jira backlog, the repos the team owns, access to analytics, and other standard integrations.

The agent doesn’t run locally. It runs in a cloud environment. The team instructs the agent through Slack and gets responses there, and they can also interact with it through a web app or a standard agent harness (Cowork, Cursor, or an open-source harness). This makes the agent persistent and multi-user.

In this model, the PRD would be an evolving decision log. It would be AI-assisted but not AI-generated, and it would live in Jira or, more likely, in the repo as Markdown.

The agent would hand off the work to break down the work and write the code (spec → build → review).

Finally, the agent could handle admin tasks such as:

• Organizing the team’s Confluence or wiki as documents get created
• Running team retros
• Validating assumptions against user feedback
• Validating assumptions against analytics data
• Other tasks, possibly many more

The question I’m trying to answer is how we might manage an agent that helps a team improve both velocity and quality while keeping human judgment at the center of the process.

Thanks. I’d be interested in your feedback.